Friday, October 04, 2013

Yesterday, Polygon asked its readers to join in on a
conversation about Kickstarter, specifically if they felt the website was
failing video game fans. If you have 30 minutes to spare, it’s worth the watch. The minisode was hosted
by 2 Polygon members, one being part of the editorial staff, and looked into how
Kickstarer is helping the indies, while not really delivering on promises.

But it’s an interesting question to pursue given how many people are looking to crowd sourcing for funding their video game endeavors. While there have been a few successes, there have been just as many, if not
more, failures or games pausing while they work on internal issues.
The release of Shadowrun has given
some hope that the Kickstarter fad can help out developers. But I also think
that this is a situation of us, the gamers, expecting too much, too fast.

Game development takes a long time, even for smaller
projects. When you care about the final piece, you can spend years crafting it
until itreaches the level that you have
always dreamed of. Take a look at mobile games, for example. They are always
coming out with new releases, updates, and game modes to better the product. And
to keep people interested, but that’s not the point here. The games that have
gone under on Kickstarter have been due to unforeseen issues (need for
additional financing, for example) or the developer didn’t properly compute the
time it would take to make the game.

It happens. People over-estimate and under achieve (not
always intentionally, of course). It's a bit early to say that Kickstarter is failing gamers. Rather, they need to give the projects time to cultivate and see the light of day, which can take years. Give it 5-10 years for crowdsourcing and then we'll have better data to pull results from.

So how do you know if the game you’re supporting is going to
be released? You don’t. The best thing that you can do to ensure that your
money is going towards a worthy project is to research. Find out about the
company, if this is their first game or fifteenth. Learn about their team and
what their turnaround time is. And if all else fails, ask! That’s why there is
a comments and Q&A section on each Kickstarter page.

Give the Polygon video a watch. What do you think about
Kickstarter failing gamers?